


Recruiting

by hakura0



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-21
Updated: 2012-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-04 01:18:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hakura0/pseuds/hakura0
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After some bad luck in recruiting a particular mutant, Erik and Charles stop off in a small vacation town in search of another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recruiting

"Well, I think that was a waste of time," Erik comments dryly as he opens the door of the car to get in. The air was cool and clear, except for the smell of alcohol permeating from the bar.

"I don't know, I think it went rather well." Charles remarks as he slips into his own seat, closing the door behind him. 

Erik almost objects, but he can almost hear the sly smile on the other man's face and he turns to look at him, eyebrows raised in question. "He told us to fuck off."

"I know." Charles tells him patiently, his expression fighting for innocence. "He was very open-minded."

The laugh sounds louder than it is in the small car, and Erik shakes his head like he disagrees with it, clearly amused. "Still, it was a waste of a trip."  
Charles waves him off the topic with a hand, still with that innocent expression that identified him as feeling anything but. "Then we'll have to fix that, won't we? What do you say we drive back? I think we can make it by dark..."

"If we're driving a plane. There's no way we can get back by dark, Charles-"

The smile widens, and that alone is enough to cut off Erik's train of thought. "I wasn't talking about getting back by dark. I'm talking about getting there." He nods towards the glove box pointedly, and after a moment's hesitation, Erik opens it to look inside. 

He finds the pamphlet in a moment, and gives Charles another look, but the other man simply nods his head at it to urge him to read. He reads, for all of the minute that it takes, and then looks back to Charles. "I can't see a single reason to go to this place. Or for it to have a brochure, for that matter. Please tell me one-"

"There's someone there." Charles tells him, and he sighs back at him. "It's on the way home, I thought it would be a nice surprise."

"We're not staying," Erik warns him, but Charles just looks at him like he's grown a second head. 

"That's ridiculous, we'd be bored out of our minds." He grins, and it prompts another smile, barely visible, out of Erik as he starts the car.

...

_It's dim in the room, and there is something about the unnatural, or maybe too natural, texture of the walls that makes Erik shudder when his hand brushes against it. He is ignoring the body in the corner, warped and mutilated, half decayed, and he thinks that Charles is, too. The smell isn't something he can ignore though, and he closes his eyes when Charles can't see, keeps his breathing shallow and his mind focused on where they were. This wasn't the place for him to be reminded, they had enough to worry about._

_"I think it's her," Charles says, carefully breaking the silence that had come with the brief reprieve of the almost empty room. Erik turned to look at him, and found his friend's eyes already on him. "The girl we're here for. I think she's causing this. It's possible the... What we saw were other people, victims of an extremely unkind set of mutations, but.."_

_"But there's something wrong with this place that goes beyond them." Erik notes, simply. There was the way it looked like it was trying to transform into someone's idea of hell some moments, and looked simply abandoned the next. "What are you thinking, Charles, a telepath?"_

_Charles shook his head. "I don't think so. That...isnt quite right. It's possible, and it's also possible that her abilities are something completely different. One thing is for sure though." He furrowed his brow in thought. "She is extremely powerful, and probably does not have control over her abilities. I think she's projecting nightmares, though whether onto us, or onto this place itself, I'm afraid I don't know."_

_"If she's a telepath, I think she'd be able to come up with a little more fuel." Erik points out, but Charles just shakes his head again._

_"It could be a different strain of telepathy. Or she could just be polite. I think... That she's projecting her own. But why..."_

_He trails off for barely a second before Erik's gaze turns almost scolding. "Charles. Why does a child dream of monsters?"_

_Their eyes meet, and Charles doesn't falter. "There could be another answer..." he offers, but he doesn't sound quite like he believes it._

_"Because they've met them." Erik says, and his gaze turns almost piercing, but Charles doesn't look away._

_"I know," he tells his friend, softer, touching his arm. "Whether or not that is the case, we should keep looking. She needs help."_

_..._

_He can see where Charles is leaning against the wall on the other side of the room, barely standing and clutching his fingers to his head, his expression twisted into something like agony. Something like devestation. He can't reach him from there, the floor has caved in the middle of the room, and even he couldn't make the plethora of exposed, rusted metal in this place hold his weight._

_But the girl is standing there, her expression hidden by the dark hair falling in front of her face. He can't reach her, either, but she, unlike Charles, can hear him._

_"Stop it," he tells her, his voice firm, for all the lack of threat he can actually offer. She turns to look at him, and there is something altogether familiar in her expression. It silences him, just for a moment, and she takes the opportunity to speak._

_"He wanted to see. He asked me to show him..." Her expression darkens as she pauses, before he speaks again. "He keeps fighting me."_

_"Tell me instead then! Or show me. You're hurting him." A hint of rage slips into his voice, and he tries to calm it, his stare resolutely upon her._

_"I'm making him understand." She tells him, something darker than frustration hidden in her tone, amongst it. "He wants to. But he won't."_

_"Maybe I will. Maybe I can explain it to him if you tell me. Let me try. Please." He kept his eyes on her, even as he saw Charles fall to his knees from the corner of his eyes. "...please."_

_There was a long moment before any of them moved, and he saw Charles lower his hand from his head. Erik could hear his breathing from across the room._

_"Meet me there," she tells him, and by the time he blinks, she's gone._

_Erik looks from the door to Charles with something like indecision, and it's when his gaze is lingering on the door that Charles speaks._

_"Erik..? What are you.." The question is dazed, still pained, confused, and part of Erik is actually thankful for it. The ease he would gain in slipping away to see the girl without him. The rest of him feels horrible for the fact. "How did you find me?"_

_"It would appear I'm drawn to you, Charles," he calls over the space between them, his tone some muddled mix of dark and light. "Are you alright?"_

_Charles sits with his eyes closed, and when he ignores the first comment, it's almost enough to worry Erik. What he says is actually more than. "I feel like I'm on fire." His voice is strained, and Erik has to fight the urge to step forward. "It's fading though, it's just...that feeling I've had since we arrived now..."_

_Erik gives him a look, before he realizes he can't see it, and speaks instead, accusing. "You never said-"_

_"Sorry." Charles offers, the word weak, and he offers a smile no stronger._

_The scowl stays on Erik's face, but he turns it from Charles. It was the sort of thing he should have grown to expect by then, he thought. "...where can I find her?" he asks, finally hoping he'll have an answer._

_Charles opens his eyes to look at him with something like realization, and their gazes catch. He can't blink, and something else flickers over Charles' face, that he can't quite place. "...the hospital I think. Erik, be careful."_

_The smile that Erik gives him is thin and false, and almost dangerous. "I will."_

_..._

_Nothing stops Erik from reaching the hospital, walking along the dilapidated streets. They're empty, and it's almost worse. For a moment he thinks he sees a shape on a wall, painted in red, but it's gone when he looks again. It was never there, and the words on the store fronts had always been in english._

_The thingspeople in the hospital don't see him, their faces wrapped and their dresses bloody. He ignores them, and they ignore him as he checks the rooms a door at a time. He finds her eventually, standing outside of the door to a room, but like everything else, once he blinks, she's gone, and he reaches out to open the door._

_He knows the smell that hits him, and he almost stops cold. Keeps his eyes open as it cloys at him, and moves further into the room. To the one place where anyone could be and the scent grows stronger. The bed is surrounded by curtains, covered, and it's not until he's almost on top of it that he can see inside._

_Erik finds her and the scent of burning flesh at once, and then there is nothing but the fire._

_..._

_She cares little and knows little of cults and circumstance. Knows only the parts of the story that she was told, and they aren't important. What she was slotted into the pieces of doesn't fit, and she slams him with the insistence of it. With the unimportance of it all, the fact that it was only ever their games._

_She tells him of their fear, their hatred, and he accepts it without a doubt, and he flinches with her as they're tied and raised, and as fire is set to them. He is not suprised, and he expects no better than it. Than the destruction that comes of it, of the blunt torture of it._

_The blaze never stops, is never halted by death or what would be an impossible amount of healing. She lives, and they live, barely seen and locked away and still tantamount to such hatred, such fear. She embellishes, over and over and he can do nothing but nod, and he knows the dark feeling that bloats within her. He can see the evolution of that nightmare realm. He can see the slaughter, and he doesn't try to steer her from it. Doesn't beget her the retaliation, the knowledge of revenge. The feeling of it. In his eyes there is no wrong, not even when it turns less focused. When she and her monsters and her dark world had overtaken the entire town._

_..._

_He asks no questions and the burning stops, and the scent of burnt flesh returns to him. Erik can see her looking at him, her eyes standing out from the darkened skin._

_"I can't leave here," she tells him before he can ask, in the form of who she was before the fire, the girl with the dark hair who has appeared across the room._

_"We'll help you," Erik promises, and he isn't sure if there's something almost sad in her eyes when he glances down at the real her before leaving._

_..._

_It's quiet in the dark halls, and he can feel the coin warm in his hand, the only real metal in the place. The only metal that listened. It was an almost cruel twisting of the universe, and he did not appreciate it._

_He did not expect to find Charles in the room, and he expected to find the man from before even less. He was being dangled by one arm, and in it's other hand, it raised the great blade. He could not stop the blade. He knew it before it started its swing. Before he focused. It was made of the same thing as everything else there. Blood and rust. He pulls the coin from his pocket instead, opening his hand and urging it on._

_The coin does not move._

_One._

_He can see the muscles in the behemoth's arm as it moves the blade, can see it's arch as if the world is in slow motion again._

_Two._

_He focuses on it with everything that he has and somewhere he hears a gunshot. Somewhere he hears screams._

_Three._

__The room is silent. _The coin does not move. The knife moves. Charles dangles, bleeding._

_The coin does not move._

_The coin does not move._

__The coin does not move.

The room is silent, and Erik's heart beats too fast in his chest. He can feel Charles' eyes on him, can feel the concern on him like the sweat that came with a nightmare.

"Again? She's dead, Erik..." he tells him, simply, like the reassurance of a child that there are no monsters under your bed. A consolance.

"I don't feel better for that," Erik reminds him, and he can hear Charles sigh.

"I know. Nor do I, but... It's the truth." Charles tells him, quiet. "She died before we got here. You keep having nightmares, trying to make it into something that it's not. There was a fire, underground, and that's why this place is in such a bad state. That police offer wasn't lying. Your imagination is a little too active of late, my friend."

There's something in Charles's tone that is much too thin, and Erik looks out the window past him. Out to the lake he knows is there, invisible in the dark of night. He stares out for a long moment, quiet, like he had been persuaded before he speaks again. "If it's my imagination, Charles, why were you awake before me?"

"I always am," the tone is mild, and almost transparent. "Or have you forgotten?"

"Not this early," Erik argues, and his answer gets naught but silence. "You've been having nightmares too. She could be out there-"

"She's dead, Erik." Charles repeats, closing his eyes quickly before Erik turns to look at him, his voice barely a whisper and a pounding in his head from strain, from pleas for release that he tries hard to forget even as he leans over to kiss Erik in hopes of soothing him. "Believe me."


End file.
